Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (Ward-Phillips Lectures in English Language and Literature ; V. 5)

University Of Chicago Press, October 1974. Paper Back. New. Concerned with his students' general inability to get themselves ''heard'' or intelligibly understood, long-time literature professor Wayne Booth reached beyond his initial assumptions of slovenliness and ineptitude to unearth a deeper failure, sprouting from modernist dogmas concerning belief and doubt. Good rhetoric is more than simply effective rhetoric, ''successful in the sense of winning assent regardless of whether assent is justified.'' Divorced from the truth (we're paraphrasing here), such rhetoric is bunk. What Booth's after is the ''art of good reasons'' -- discovering what authentically warrants assent. Taking cues from philosopher of science Michael Polanyi and Aristotelian scholar Richard McKeon (as well as John Henry Newman, Kenneth Burke and Carl Jung), Booth first exposes modernist assumptions such as ''you cannot reason about values'' and ''the job of thought is to doubt whatever can be doubted,'' then suggests a rhetoric of ''systematic assent'' anchored in ''the great reservoir'' of the good. He explores art and literature's ability to teach and change minds. He reminds us (via the work of modern psychologists) that our selves are made through significant encounter with others. And most importantly, he gives us a framework whereby these ''good reasons'' are restored to intellectual respectability, that we might decide for ourselves when we ought change our minds.